Satellite sea-level data ’tilted to distort figures,’ says expert

British member of IPCC delegation admits, ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

Apocalyptic warnings that islands such as the Maldives will sink beneath the waves are “nonsense,” says Nils-Axel Mörner, former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. Any rise in sea levels has to do with natural historic fluctuations.

At this year’s climate conference in Durban, South Africa, Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, warned that his country was ‘an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

‘We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,’ Nasheed repeatedly claims.

“If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports,” says Mörner. “Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by ‘global warming’?”

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that satellite observations show that “since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’”

“Almost every word of this is untrue,” says Mörner. “Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.”

Rajenda Pachauri, head of the International Panel on Climate Change, echoes President Nasheed’s sentiments, saying that coastal areas and islands are threatened with inundation by global warming.

But again, Mörner disagrees. In a letter to the Spectator, Mörner writes:

As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million ‘ecological refugees’. I have carefully examined the data of ‘drowning’ Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

“Data from satellites has been ’tilted’ to distort figures,” says Mörner. The IPCC’s views on sea-level rises are dishonest.

“In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year: where are those refugees? And where are those sea level rises? There are many urgent natural problems to consider on Planet Earth — tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions not least among them. But the threat of rising sea levels is an artificial crisis.”

Nils-Axel Mörner was head of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University (1991-2005), president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999-2003), leader of the Maldives sea level project (2000-11), chairman of the INTAS project on geomagnetism and climate (1997-2003).

Two years ago I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Dr. Mörner at the 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago.

Sea level always changes, said Mörner. Sea level has risen by 120 meters since the end of the last ice age. In fact, sea level had been rising two meters per century, but now it has slowed to only 20 centimeters per century. And sea level in Tuvalu, if anything, has fallen.

“There is absolutely no signal that the sea level is rising (in Tuvalu),” says Mörner.” If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.”

As Chicken Little said, “The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling!” I am sure that is what is causing this “mysterious rise” in sea levels. WAIT!! I’m sorry, that isn’t the sky falling, that’s just chemtrails coming home to roost. “Never mind.”

As a scientist (and a Brit) I have only one thing to say to the British “scientist” who colluded in the fraudulent tilting of the satellite altimetry record: SHAME ON YOU! You are no scientist – you are a political puppet.

Well done to Dr. Morner for highlighting this. And well done to Robert Felix for publicising it.

How can these charlatans who falsify their data call themselves scientists?

I tried posting this on the two more appropriate threads above, but it did not seem to register.

The Twitpic on the website suggests how those in SW USA should interpret their local forecasts over the next few days to get a truer picture of what the weather will do. Basically expect much more snow and much stronger winds.

This reminds me of an episode of Gilligan’s Island where Gilligan moves the Professor’s sea level guage (a stick) further into the lagoon in order to set a lobster trap. The Professor is alarmed by the apparently rising sea level. This was a case of Gilligan’s innocent mistake causing urgent preparations on the island. However, the IPCC scientists don’t appear so innocent in motivation.